Traditionally, clinicians have to move through multiple parts of a hospital room to obtain needed equipment or supplies, and patients find themselves in an often unwelcoming and intimidating environment that lacks many of the comforting features they find at home. In addition, friends and members of the patient's family often find themselves in the way of the clinician while trying to visit the patient. The room layout does little to foster the required collaborative healthcare relationship among patient, clinician, and family.
Clinicians also face continuous demands on their time. For example, a clinician can face multiple interruptions between the time the clinician retrieves a patient's medication(s) from a medication dispensing station and the time that the medication(s) is actually administered to the patient. This can lead to errors in the medication-administration process.
In addition, many of the components present in the hospital room operate independently of each other. It is often the caregiver's responsibility to provide the needed integration by taking the results generated from one piece of equipment and manually inputting them into another piece of equipment or information system. The consequence of this is a lag in time between when the results are actually generated and when they are available to be used in the care of the patient, and general disorganization of the care experience for all stakeholders.